at a glance...

Hometown: Cleveland, OH
First Recordings: 1975

Members:
David Thomas -vocals, spike, horn
Tom Herman -guitar
Alan Ravenstein -EML synthesizer
Tony Maimone -electric bass
Scott Krauss -drums, percussion

Bands In The Family:
David Thomas & Two Pale Boys, David Thomas and foreigners, Home & Garden, The Red Krayola, The Golden Palominos

Notes:
Pere Ubu formed from the ashes of Rocket From The Tombs, a little-known Cleveland avant-garage band led by vocalist David Thomas and guitarist Peter Laughner. The two, intent on preserving a couple of RFTT songs, convened a handful of fellow rock and roll misfits to record a single. That session yielded "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" and "Heart of Darkness," perhaps the greatest single made anywhere in the USA during the '70s. Suitably heartened, the band soldiered on through innumerable line-ups (Thomas leads the band today; Laughner died as a consequence of excessive personal habits a couple years after the band began), periodic break-ups, and myriad stylistic changes.

The Modern Dance changed the way I heard music when I first taped it off a friend in 1981; 17 years and three or four copies down the road it still sounds fantastic.

Back then it was a bracing shock to the central nervous system, the sound of music flying in a dozen different directions at once and yet cohering into a powerful, singularly evocative expression of possibility and perspective. The Modern Dance reaffirmed that rock and roll could be a vehicle for authentic artistic statements, and that this could be done without rubbing the listener in the rank stench of the performer's narcissistic self-adoration. It also sounded, back in the day, completely alien and yet somehow familiar. On the one hand you had David Thomas's inchoate yelps and Allen Ravenstine's hissing, sparking, whistling EML synthesizer. On the other was a driving, full-steam-ahead rhythm section and a guitarist who obviously knew how to negotiate the distance between the Missippi Delta, Chuck Berry, and outer space, and was glad to weave his map into every ascerbic lick that he played.

This is the soundtrack of intelligent men lost in the wretched cultural wasteland of the 70s, aware that their city was rotting around them and in love with its corroded rusting beauty. This is one of the best records ever made.